The Syrian Tragedy of ‘So Much Damn Time Navel Gazing’

The New York Times has published a deeply reported and well-sourced account of the tortuous 2011-2013 path of the Obama administration’s Syria policy. The money quote is attributed to a "former senior White house official" (which rather narrows the list of possibilities considerably): "We spent so much damn time navel gazing, and that’s the tragedy of it."

The reporting reinforces the most important thing that we already knew: The equivocation at the heart of the administration’s approach to Syria can be traced directly to the ambivalence within the Barack Obama himself. Yes, the rest of his administration was deeply divided, but they were cueing off the divisions within the president’s own mind.

The reporting also tells us new things that even close observers of the process may not have known, including:

• Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was an early opponent of the Petraeus plan floated in the summer of 2012 to arm the rebels. She subsequently came to support a more robust interventionist posture on Syria, but back when a more limited intervention might have worked, she apparently opposed it. Since Rice swore after the Rwanda tragedy not to be party to inaction when action might prevent mass atrocities, her opposition to an action plan backed by CIA Director David Petraeus, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is striking.
• The president conveyed to his team not merely ambivalence but outright disengagement. Here is how the NYT reporters tell it: "Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum."
• Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, the person whom the president met with at the last moment, right before the president did an abrupt about-face and postponed the airstrikes in order to kick the issue over to Congress, was also the most ardent opponent to intervention in Syria. I have heard from quite a few Obama supporters who blame the chief of staff for not adequately protecting the president from the embarrassing spectacle of the policy flip-flops after the massive chemical weapons attack last August. But according to the NYT, McDonough was an important advocate for the noninterventionist approach and not merely the one determined to make the process run smoothly.
• At least privately, the president understood and conceded that the "lead from behind" Libya operation was a mixed bag, as Republican critics claimed. The Libya operation was an example of "mission creep," according to Obama. Rather than setting the precedent of what to do, it was seen at least in part as a caution of what to avoid.
• When the president finally decided to authorize action to arm the rebels in the spring of 2013, the administration expected this to be a covert action. However, when reports of Bashar al-Assad’s regime repeatedly crossing Obama’s putative "red line" on chemical weapons became irrefutable in June 2013, the White House unexpectedly issued a public announcement about the operation and, in so doing, surprised the rest of the administration. 

Throughout the NYT‘s account, one is struck by the way the 2012 reelection campaign negatively influenced the evolution of policy on Syria. Ironically, sympathetic experts have traced the initial failure of the health-care reform website to a similar desire to delay tough choices until after reelection. The administration’s struggles in getting the policy and the politics to work together, rather than at cross-purposes, have had a profound effect on foreign and domestic policy.

The NYT‘s account rings true to me. Similar accounts could be and were written about how previous administrations wrestled with difficult national security policy choices, including during the last two, which I served in. The article is a powerful corrective for anyone who thinks the choices are easy and is a useful reminder that often the best policies are merely the least worst ones available.